Audio Technology, February 4, 2014: Difference between revisions
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'''CROSSOVER PATHS''' | '''CROSSOVER PATHS''' | ||
When news broke of the Wise Up Ghost collaboration there was widespread concern that Costello, a British singer-songwriter emerging from the 1970s New Wave movement, was jumping on the latest bandwagon, and that the world was going to witness a Costello-gone-hip hop car crash. In this day and age of extensive genre crossovers, the eyebrow-raising is surprising. Especially given Costello’s long reputation for eclectic collaborations, including with classical music acts like [[The Brodsky Quartet]], all the way to [[Burt Bacharach]], and [[Paul McCartney]]. And this could be one of his best. Costello’s intense, hoarse vocals fit seamlessly with The Root’s relaxed but deep muscular grooves. If anything, both Costello and The Roots sound revitalised, demonstrating a connection that usually takes decades to foster. Though, in truth, it did take a couple of years. | When news broke of the ''Wise Up Ghost'' collaboration there was widespread concern that Costello, a British singer-songwriter emerging from the 1970s New Wave movement, was jumping on the latest bandwagon, and that the world was going to witness a Costello-gone-hip hop car crash. In this day and age of extensive genre crossovers, the eyebrow-raising is surprising. Especially given Costello’s long reputation for eclectic collaborations, including with classical music acts like [[The Brodsky Quartet]], all the way to [[Burt Bacharach]], and [[Paul McCartney]]. And this could be one of his best. Costello’s intense, hoarse vocals fit seamlessly with The Root’s relaxed but deep muscular grooves. If anything, both Costello and The Roots sound revitalised, demonstrating a connection that usually takes decades to foster. Though, in truth, it did take a couple of years. | ||
The collaboration originated when the two parties met at [[Late Night With Jimmy Fallon]]. The Roots, led by drummer Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson, have been the Jimmy Fallon show house band since the beginning of 2009, and later that year backed Costello on a version of his song High Fidelity, chosen by Mandel. Another year went by, and Costello was back on the show to promote his album ''National Ransom'', playing an album track with the Roots and Guitarist [[John McLaughlin]]. The stirring combination of wordy song and ballsy funk grooves was an indication of things to come. | The collaboration originated when the two parties met at [[Late Night With Jimmy Fallon]]. The Roots, led by drummer Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson, have been the Jimmy Fallon show house band since the beginning of 2009, and later that year backed Costello on a version of his song High Fidelity, chosen by Mandel. Another year went by, and Costello was back on the show to promote his album ''National Ransom'', playing an album track with the Roots and Guitarist [[John McLaughlin]]. The stirring combination of wordy song and ballsy funk grooves was an indication of things to come. | ||
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'''UP TOP AT 30 ROCK''' | '''UP TOP AT 30 ROCK''' | ||
While many of the origins for the songs on Wise Up Ghost came from individuals working things out by themselves on a computer - whether that be Mandel sampling Elvis songs or Elvis laying down his ideas in Garageband - the team were eager for the albums to sound as live as possible, and not entirely like a hip hop cut-and-paste affair. For this reason, Mandel recorded live playing as early as possible, usually going for whole takes. Amazingly the vast majority of the recordings were done at The Roots’ tiny rehearsal room at the NBC building in the Rockefeller Center. The famous address - 30 Rockefeller Plaza in downtown Manhattan - is why they tend to refer to the studio as 30 Rock, even though its official name is Feliz Habitat Studios. Mandel clearly took pride in the fact it’s a very unlikely place to make high-end recordings. He sees it as another illustration of great recordings being about the music and the people, and not about the gear or the studio. | While many of the origins for the songs on ''Wise Up Ghost'' came from individuals working things out by themselves on a computer - whether that be Mandel sampling Elvis songs or Elvis laying down his ideas in Garageband - the team were eager for the albums to sound as live as possible, and not entirely like a hip hop cut-and-paste affair. For this reason, Mandel recorded live playing as early as possible, usually going for whole takes. Amazingly the vast majority of the recordings were done at The Roots’ tiny rehearsal room at the NBC building in the Rockefeller Center. The famous address - 30 Rockefeller Plaza in downtown Manhattan - is why they tend to refer to the studio as 30 Rock, even though its official name is Feliz Habitat Studios. Mandel clearly took pride in the fact it’s a very unlikely place to make high-end recordings. He sees it as another illustration of great recordings being about the music and the people, and not about the gear or the studio. | ||
'''Mandel:''' “30 Rock is the most ridiculous studio, a main room and a room for the drum kit, and a lounge at the back. The two keyboard players, the percussionist, the bass player, the guitar player and I all fit in the main space, and Ahmir is in the room next to us. The main door leading into the hallway is soundproofed, as is Ahmir’s space, not for acoustic reasons but to make sure we’re not bothering people outside! We are really minimalist, almost to a fault. In fact we prefer this kind of uncomfortable setting, because it means that you do what you have to do and then you get the hell of the room! It’s a kind of guerilla approach to recording. | '''Mandel:''' “30 Rock is the most ridiculous studio, a main room and a room for the drum kit, and a lounge at the back. The two keyboard players, the percussionist, the bass player, the guitar player and I all fit in the main space, and Ahmir is in the room next to us. The main door leading into the hallway is soundproofed, as is Ahmir’s space, not for acoustic reasons but to make sure we’re not bothering people outside! We are really minimalist, almost to a fault. In fact we prefer this kind of uncomfortable setting, because it means that you do what you have to do and then you get the hell of the room! It’s a kind of guerilla approach to recording. | ||
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'''WHAT MATTERS''' | '''WHAT MATTERS''' | ||
In keeping with his ‘gear and recording space don’t matter’ ethos, Mandel was reluctant to divulge too much about his signal chains, but after some gentle coaxing he relented and provided some details, also of the sessions in Vancouver and Philadelphia. | |||
'''Mandel:''' “There are many Shure microphones at 30 Rock, perhaps because of some kind of sponsorship deal, so that’s mainly what I used. Everything went through Avid mic pres. I had a couple of mics on the kick drum, Shure Beta 52A on the front, and the other being a AKG D112, placed where the pedal hits the skin so you get a combination of the kick and the snare. This has long been one of our favourite mics to use for hip hop, because it gives you a really crisp sound. It’s one of our secret weapons. Then I had Shure KSM137 condenser mics on the top and bottom of the snare, a couple of Shure KSM313 ribbon overhead mics, and Beta 98s on the floor and rack toms, plus I put a Shure SM57 behind ?uest for a real garbage-like room sound. There’s no space to put a mic in front of him! | |||
“For the bass and the guitar I used mostly Shure SM78 mics on the cabinets, though I recorded DI as well. The keyboard sounds came mostly from the Yamaha Motif XF8, recorded with a DI box, and then treated with Line6’s AmpFarm, which is our favourite plug-in. That incredible piano sound on Puppet, for example, I could lie and tell you we recorded it in a church, but it was the Motif, recorded via a DI! | |||
I went to Vancouver to record Elvis at a studio there called Crew, where I tried several different mics on him, and ended up using a prototype CM12SE from Advanced Audio. In Vancouver, Elvis played real Wurlitzer and real Fender Rhodes. When Elvis came later to record in 30 Rock I tried the CM12SE on him again, because I paid 700 bucks for it, and I was ‘going to use it!’ But it didn’t have the same magic as when we used it in Vancouver, probably because the mic was too bright for the room in 30 Rock. So I switched to one of our regular Shure mics, the KSM9, and it sounded more natural. Finally, I recorded the horns in ?uestlove’s Philly studio, using Neumann U87 mics going through Focusrite mic pres. The strings were arranged by Brent Fischer and recorded by Rafa Sardina at Conway Studios in Los Angeles. | |||
“Of course, you can use exactly the same gear that I used, but you won’t get the same sound, because you need Elvis, ?uest, and The Roots for that. Gear is important, and there’s an art or science using it, but I am not a gear head, and I never was. I am more a musicologist than a technician. For me, other things are more interesting, like how to conduct a session, how to handle players, how to get good arrangements, and so on. The reason I do this for a living is because I love listening to music and listening to records. The technical side is something you have to do, but making music is something you ''want'' to do. Of course, I prefer great microphones to bad ones, but you don’t always have great microphones around, and it’s more expensive to rent a real piano than to use a sample. Remember, we had no budget. So you learn to work with what you have. | |||
“In terms of conducting a session, even though we have the technology to loop everything an applied a lot of the cut and paste hip-hop aesthetic. I would still ask the musicians to play full takes. Sometimes someone would say, ‘I’ve just played this part for two minutes, can’t you sample eight bars and loop me?’ And my response always was, ‘No, I need a full take, because it allows for small variations to happen, or even for mistakes to occur, which can give us new ideas. One of our main principles is that many of the greatest things happen when you make mistakes. Playing full takes really helps to thrwart that ‘digital thing’. Ahmir is the one to credit for that. He’d been making straight hip-hop in Philly for years, and even then he was playing full takes. It’s part of what makes him unique.” | |||
'''GUERILLA MIX''' | |||
After several months of recording and editing and cutting and pasting and rearranging and trying things out during the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, Mandel set about mixing the album. In keeping with his and The Roots’ wilfully irreverent minimalist attitude to gear and studios, he mixed almost the entire project at 30 Rock, on a pair of old JBL monitors, and after he blew those out, on some Genelec 1032A monitors. In keeping with the modern DAW approach, Mandel already mixed the album “from day one; the moment we put down the first couple of notes I tried to figure out how loud they should be.” But nonetheless, a final mix stage involved Mandel locking himself in the 30 Rock rehearsal room during down time for many hundreds, if not thousands of hours. | |||
'''Mandel:''' “The process depended very much on the song. Mixing [[The Puppet Has Cut His Strings]], for example, was very quick because there literally are no effects on that. Elvis recorded the vocals on his computer, which created the compressed vocal sound, and the music is just drums, bass and piano - I added no plug-ins at all. To me, it’s one of the best-sounding songs on the album, with all the space and depth we were after. That’s when you realise it’s just ?uestlove, Elvis, and the other players; not me. But other songs have tons of plug-ins, mostly EQs and compressors. We were trying to keep things as organic as possible and only use effects for a reason. Like on [[Tripwire]], I put some heavy delays on Elvis’ vocal, because it made it blend in better with whatever else was on that track. I was also trying to craft the sounds based on what he was singing about. The effects are supposed to complement and augment the song, and not attract attention to themselves.” | |||
While Mandel gives off an air of indifference to what gear he uses, or where he records, he clearly agonises extensively over the end result. He was outed recently by ?uestlove who was browsing the Fallon show iTunes library, cruising for songs to play during commercial breaks. | |||
'''Mandel:'''”While doing this he comes across mix after mix after mix of the songs of the album we did with Elvis. There were like 100 versions of Walk Us Uptown, and 150 versions of [[Come The Meantimes|Come The Meantime]], and he came up to me and asked ‘Steven, what the f**k is going on?’ So I tried to explain my process to him. | |||
“Once I have the sounds to a decent standard and a balance that I like. I’ll print the mix, because it makes it more real to me. It puts a sort of pressure on me, and it allows me to gauge the mix as a whole, and also whether there are details that need correcting that I may not have heard or have not allowed myself to become aware of. My other trick is to print a capella, instrumental and TV mixes before I print the main mix. These allow me to hear things I can’t hear in the full mixes. My main criterion is whether I think I can live with a mix for the rest of my life.” | |||
Judging by the reception to ''Wise Up Ghost'', Mandel has no reason to worry or to forgive himself. The album has all the signs of going down to posterity as a masterpiece. | |||
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{{Bibliography notes header}} | {{Bibliography notes header}} | ||
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{{Bibliography images}} | {{Bibliography images}} | ||
[[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology cover.png| | [[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology cover.png|x200px|border]]<br> | ||
[[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 12-13.png| | [[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 12-13.png|x200px|border|pages 12-13]]<br> | ||
[[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 14-15.png| | [[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 14-15.png|x200px|border|pages 14-15]]<br> | ||
[[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 16-17.png| | [[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology pages 16-17.png|x200px|border|pages 16-17]]<br> | ||
[[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology page 18.png| | [[image:2014-02-04 Audio Technology page 18.png|x200px|border|page 18]] | ||
<br><small>Cover and page scans.</small> | <br><small>Cover and page scans.</small> | ||
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<center><h3> DRUM SECRETS </h3></center> | |||
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{{Bibliography text}} | |||
?uestlove watches re-runs of Soul Train during every practise. It gets him in the groove, and provides a little company in his iso-booth. While he was or wasn’t watching this is what Mandel snuck around this his kit. | |||
'''Mandel:''' “I had a couple of mics on the kick drum, Shure Beta 52A on the front, and the other being a AKGD112, placed where the pedal hits the skin so you get a combination of the kick and the snare. This has long been one of our favourite mics to use for hip hop, because it gives you a really crisp sound. It’s one of our secret weapons. Then I had Shure KSM137 condenser mics on the top and bottom of the snare, a couple of Shure KSM313 ribbon overhead mics, and Beta 98s on the floor and rack toms, plus I put a Shure SM57 behind ?uest for a real garbage-like room sound. There’s no space to put a mic in front of him!” | |||
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{{Bibliography notes footer}} | {{Bibliography notes footer}} | ||
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[[Category:Audio Technology| Audio Technology 2014-02-04]] | [[Category:Audio Technology| Audio Technology 2014-02-04]] | ||
[[Category:Magazine articles]] | [[Category:Magazine articles]] | ||
Latest revision as of 08:54, 7 September 2017
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